Jack Kerouac, Hugh MacLennan, Arthur Machen, mystery, wonder, paradise, and wow

excerpted from THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves, by Jack Haas

“¼it came to me that to love the mystery surrounding us is

the final and only sanction of human existence.”

Hugh MacLennan

It is a pathless way back to rapture, and it is available to all of us; and so it is now merely a choice for each of us to rise up and follow, to walk or to wallow; it is up to each of us to find the beauty and miracle again in life, and in ourselves, and to deliver our gospel, however impossibly we may, to our unrapturous fellows still trapped in an unwonderful day.

As Arthur Machen contends: “Some have declared that it lies within our choice to gaze continually upon a world of equal or even greater wonder and beauty. It is said by these that the experiments of the alchemists in the Dark Ages¼are, in fact, related not to the transmutation of metals, but to the transmutation of the entire Universe. ¼This method, or art, or science, or whatever we choose to call it¼is simply concerned to restore the delights of the primal Paradise; to enable men, if they will, to inhabit a world of joy and splendor. It is perhaps possible that there is such an experiment, and that there are some who have made it.”

And so, finding his own philosopher’s stone, Jack Kerouac announced: “...I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was “Wow!”

excerpted from:

THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves

by Jack Haas

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